Shaving in the Dark

A short essay on the first page of Shaving in the Dark’s inaugural issue satirizes the comics quarterly’s own central ethos: “Why did I agree to write for this magazine?!!” it starts, and ends with the answer: “Because I said ‘no way, this is where I draw the line’ and these morons actually gave me some paper to do so!!!!”

SITD started as an indie comics art collective in Shanghai, planning a single thin publication so the founders would have a platform on which to publish their own comics. Their objective was to encourage themselves to create more, with no pressure to create something “good,” at least not by any standard other than that creating anythingat all is good.

漫画季刊《胡子拉碴》（Shaving in the Dark，简称SITD）创刊号首页的一篇短文就以杂志的创刊理念为梗进行自嘲，开篇提出“为什么我要答应给这本杂志写稿！？”，在结尾奉上答案：“就因为我说‘不可能，这就是我的底线’，这些白痴竟然真的给我纸，让我画出来！！”

The publication borrows part of its aesthetic from “zines,” informal publications often made on photocopiers for a gritty or amateurish visual aesthetic. Outwardly sleek and colorful, the interior of each issue is an organized mess of black-and-white comics, sometimes one page, sometimes many, by artists of all levels, backgrounds, and interests.

In the words of Jay Mark Caplan, one of the original founders, “It’s about having a beginner’s mindset. To not be afraid of not knowing what you’re doing, to not let that keep you from doing it, and to create.” The very name of the publication comes from another co-founder’s grandfather’s expression: “shaving in the dark” describes a situation where you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Though Shaving in the Dark only started in 2017, they quickly grew into a quarterly, and perhaps even more quickly, grew an attached community. “There were a lot of people out there who felt the same as us, who wanted art and comics to play a bigger role in their lives.” Now it operates more like an organization, hosting monthly drink-and-draw events, collaborating with other Shanghai arts organizations such as the Shanghai Literary Review and Unravel, and recently, even working with brands.

They’re also starting to see themselves more as publishers. Besides the quarterly, SITD has also released Peach Fuzz—”the teenage zine for zine-age teens”—which features only art by local high school students. They also produce “shaving kits,” which are smaller cartoon booklets featuring art by individual underground artists, which they hope will make it easier for more Chinese artists to collaborate with them.

This last in particular is a way to engage more with a local Chinese audience. To this end, besides the shaving kits, issues have included a smattering of bilingual comics, recently shifting in the direction of leaving Chinese works untranslated so as not to privilege an English-speaking audience.

Also part of this drive is the most recent issue, Mute. Each issue has had a different theme on which contributing artists base their work; past themes have been (in order of release) Shave, Pets, Apocalypse, Metamorphosis, and Trip. Zovi Weng, another co-founder, notes, “The themes are there to be interpreted, misinterpreted, overinterpreted, whatever. It’s very loose.” The sixth issue, Mute, was slightly stricter—as another effort at inclusion, it experiments solely with textless comics.

“I think the themes that we pick usually come from an inspiration we had at that moment,” says Zovi. “I want it to be something that resonates with what you were thinking at the moment, or seeing around.” She attributes this to the French satirical political magazines she grew up with, which reacted very specifically to events on the average person’s mind. Notably, both Jay and Zovi mentioned comics publishers that encouraged artists to move away from larger publishers. Jay brought up Image Comics, a company formed in 1992 by disgruntled artists leaving Marvel and DC in order to retain ownership of their ideas; Zovi referenced L’Association, founded by seven cartoonists struggling to find a mainstream outlet for their work. But both admitted being drawn specifically to publishers that aged with their audience; both agreed that a lot of comics they grew up with “didn’t go through puberty, thematically.”

This certainly can’t be said of the content of Shaving in the Dark. There is a wide range of themes, plenty of mature language, occasional nudity, and references to drugs and alcohol. “We don’t want to censor our artists,” Jay shrugged. In fact, Shaving in the Dark has only turned away a couple of pieces in their whole history; one for being 22 pages long and a couple for containing racist elements. Besides that, their harshest editorial work (starting with Issue 5) has been asking artists to redraw sections or cutting pages out of a submission.

“On one level, it has this amateur quality because we want to encourage people to contribute,” says Jay. But along with the growing community comes higher-quality art. “Even very professional artists have the same desire as us for an outlet without pressure, to do whatever they want.”

Moving forward, they admit they’ll have to start being a little pickier as more submissions come in. I asked if they saw any conflict between this possibility and the magazine’s drive for inclusivity and encouraging amateurs. Zovi immediately replied in the negative. “’Do it anyways’ is a thing you can do all the time–I think the drink-and-draw events really reflect that—but then at some point, critique will make you better. So for me, those things aren’t in conflict . . . I think it’s essential to that spirit of ‘go out and do it,’ but be ready to get it back in your face.”

Shaving in the Dark still seems to be looking for its place in the world. The team is expanding the business side of things, selling more products like mugs, postcards, bags, and t-shirts, and recently locking down a more permanent space for everything at Subland Quarter (51 Runan Jie, near Jumen Lu). With furious energy, they paint murals, host comics workshops, coordinate classes for everything from screen printing to live drawing and much more. They’re still in their early days yet, and the organization’s expansive nature belies its actual youth. If this is what they’re doing in the dark, we can surely look forward to the things they’ll accomplish once they turn on the lights.